Video: Defenestration

Recent Examples of defenestration from the Web

People saw how quickly NBC News acted, at a great cost to the network, and insiders seem to be taking leadership at its word that the transgressions leading to Lauer’s defenestration were previously unknown at the highest levels of the organization.

Tillerson aides later joked that Kennedy’s defenestration was like something out of the Soviet Union, dragging a political foe out into the street and shooting him in the head so as to send a message to others.

But in the aftermath of Mistry’s defenestration, Tata Sons has sought to portray Mistry as a bumbling corporate naïf, dependent for ideas on a coterie of outside advisers and flummoxed by the complexities of running a large conglomerate.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'defenestration.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Did You Know?

These days defenestration is often used to describe the forceful removal of someone from public office or from some other advantageous position. History’s most famous defenestration, however, was one in which the tossing out the window was quite literal. On May 23, 1618, two imperial regents were found guilty of violating certain guarantees of religious freedom. As punishment, they were thrown out the window of Prague Castle. The men survived the 50-foot tumble into the moat, but the incident, which became known as the Defenestration of Prague, marked the beginning of the Bohemian resistance to Hapsburg rule that eventually led to the Thirty Years' War.